SPEAKERS - MELBOURNE 2017

Jonathan Bryce

Executive Director, OpenStack Foundation

Jonathan Bryce, who has spent his career building the cloud, is Executive Director of the OpenStack Foundation. Previously he was a founder of The Rackspace Cloud. He started his career working as a web developer for Rackspace, and during his tenure, he and co-worker Todd Morey had a vision to build a sophisticated web hosting environment where users and businesses alike could turn to design, develop and deploy their ideal web site – all without being responsible for procuring the technology, installing it or making sure it is built to be always available. This vision became The Rackspace Cloud. Since then he has been a major driver of OpenStack, the open source cloud software initiative.

Tristan Goode

CEO, Aptira

CEO, Aptira
Over 25 years’ experience in the IT industry has given Tristan a solid reputation as an innovative architect in systems infrastructure and enterprise solutions. Forward-thinking with strong attention to detail, Tristan has been responsible for designing, implementing and maintaining solutions for the likes of BTR Nylex, NEC, OzEmail, Intel, and iPrimus.

Tristan has an unwavering commitment to exceed expectations for both the business and the customer, and is driven by his personal desire to create unique, effective solutions for any requirements Aptira’s customers may present. Tristan is a founding and 4 times elected Board Director of the OpenStack Foundation, an OpenStack Ambassador, and the founder of the Australian OpenStack User Group.

Heidi Joy Tretheway

Senior Marketing Manager, OpenStack Foundation

At the OpenStack Foundation, Heidi Joy focuses on brand, content and community marketing, and spearheads the User Survey. Previously, Heidi Joy was director of marketing communications for a mobile software company, head of global communications for a commercial real estate firm, and a business journalist. She is a frequent public speaker on topics including women in tech, content marketing, writing and publishing. She is also the author of eight books.

Michael Still

Senior Software Development Manager, Rackspace

OpenStack core developer and former Nova PTL, as well as experienced software and reliability engineer. Part of the team that grew Google Mobile to being a billion dollar business. Director of linux.conf.au 2013. Author of The Definitive Guide to ImageMagick (www.imagemagickbook.com) and Practical MythTV (www.mythtvbook.com) from Apress, as well as a bunch of articles.

Steven Manos

Principal Advisor, Research Computation Strategy, The University of Melbourne

Dr. Steven Manos is currently developing strategies and implementing projects which will support the compute and data-intensive nature of research over the next decade at the University of Melbourne. Throughout 2011 and 2012, he led the development of the Nectar OpenStack research cloud at the University of Melbourne, and led the Research Platforms team of nearly 30 people who are responsible for digital research platforms, training and engagement. His personal mission is evolve and develop a workforce and community that will transform the way research happens in a data-rich world. Part of the solution is to lift the digital prowess and literacy of the research community by arming them with the digital platforms and skills. He does this by building communities, actively
training researchers in innovative ways and establishing innovative and extremely usable platforms for research. In the past he did a PhD in Physics at Sydney University and a stint of post-doctoral research at University College London. He lives in Melbourne with his partner and son, and enjoys designing and making furniture.

Tom Fifield

Community Manager, OpenStack Foundation

Since gaining experience working to support an experiment at the Large Hadron Collider - the largest scientific endeavour in the world - Tom has been passionate about large-scale distributed computing.

Tom has worked alongside collaborators from dozens of countries to facilitate distributed computing design, reliable operations in minimal staff environments and interoperability between different technologies.

After working as a cloud architecture consultant and team lead to create clouds for several years, Tom is now tackling the most important part of distributed systems - people, as a community manager.

Andrew Hatfield

Practice Lead – Cloud Storage and Big Data, Red Hat

Andrew has over 20 years experience in the IT industry across APAC, specialising in Databases, Directory Systems, Groupware, Virtualisation and Storage for Enterprise and Government organisations. When not helping customers slash costs and increase agility by moving to the software-defined storage future, he’s enjoying the subtle tones of Islay Whisky and shredding pow pow on the world’s best snowboard resorts.

Jessica Field

Marketing Director, Aptira | Board of Directors, OpenStack

Jessica is the Marketing Director for the leading provider of OpenStack services in the APAC region - Aptira, and also sits on the Board of Directors for OpenStack.

For the past decade, Jessica has been an active contributor to the Open Source community in Australia. This includes running multiple Open Source and technology meetups in Sydney, and have previously held positions on two industry Boards: the Open Source Industry Association (OSIA), and the Australian Web Industry Association (AWIA).

Jessica co-organises the Sydney OpenStack User Group, and OpenStack Australia Day. She has also organised a range of other industry events in Sydney, including Port80, Magento and the Australian Web Awards. Jessica also manages the creative design agency – Onefishsea.

Having completed her MBA in 2014, Jessica currently lives in sunny Port Macquarie and loves the beach.

JR Rivers

Co-Founder & CTO, Cumulus Networks

JR is a co-founder and CTO of the company where he works on company, technology, and product direction. JR has been involved with networking since Ethernet only ran on coaxial cables. He's worked on some of the most foundational networking products of their time, from early Network Interface Cards at 3Com through switching and routing products at Cisco. JR's early involvement in home-grown networking at Google and as the VP of System Architecture for Cisco's Unified Computing System both helped fine tune his perspective on networking for the modern datacenter.

Quinton Anderson

Head of Engineering and Platform Products, Commonwealth Bank

I am a delivery focussed IT Leader. I believe in building a team with the right people and then enabling them to succeed. I believe that a highly motivated and skilled team is vital to success and that my role in a management position is to create an environment in which this exists and then combine it with the appropriate processes, domain expertise and technology to create success. I find delivering IT projects extremely challenging and exciting. I believe that software systems should be engineered through quantitative and disciplined processes and that quality should be an absolute focus.

Talia Sela

Product Manager of Cloudify, GigaSpaces

Tali Sela is a Product Manager for Cloudify - meaning she dedicates virtually all of her waking time to bettering the world through open source code. Tali brings extensive experience in coding, product management and diverse cloud and enterprise IT technologies to help deliver an excellent user experience for Cloudify. Prior to Cloudify, Tali was a Technical Account Manager at Microsoft, Planning Cloud solutions for a variety of technical customers. During the little personal time she has left, she likes to hike, jog and collect rubber duckies. Come say hi, she's friendly.

Peter Jung

Senior Business Development Manager, Red Hat

Peter Jung is a Senior Business Development Manager at Red Hat where he leads the practice in the areas of Cloud, SDN/NFV and IoT across Australia and New Zealand. He is passionate about open innovation and open source software development model as the foundation for next generation society and ICT systems. Prior to Red Hat, he had various roles at Cisco and Dell for 15 years. He holds a BSEE and an MBA.

Avi Miller

Product Management Director, Oracle

Avi is the Product Management Director for Oracle Linux and has extensive experience across operating system, virtualisation and application stacks.

Andrew Boag

Managing Director, Catalyst IT

Andrew Boag is the Managing Director of Catalyst IT Australia and has worked in a range of technology roles. Including Media, Telecommunications, Web Application development and Solutions Architecture. Andrew is passionate about free and open source technology.

Scott Coulton

Senior Software Engineer, Product and Technology, Puppet

Scott is a software engineer and has previously been a solutions architect and platform engineering lead with 10 years’ experience in the managed services and hosting space. He has extensive experience in architecture. Rolling out systems and network solutions for national and multinational companies with a wide variety of technologies, including AWS, Puppet, Docker, Cisco, VMware, Microsoft and Linux. My design strengths are in cloud computing, automation and the security space

Daniel Russell

Platform Engineer, Hostworks

Daniel is Platform Engineer at Hostworks and specialises in their On-Premises OpenStack cloud offering.

David Flanders

Research Community Manager, University of Melbourne | Community Wrangler, OpenStack

David F. Flanders is a wrangler of communities for the OpenStack Foundation, specifically growing the application developer community and University sector engagements. Previously having worked in University datacentres and Entrepreneurial investment funds, Flanders loves the challenge of understanding how brilliant people come together as a community to shape the future of the information sector.

David Iles

Senior Director, Mellanox Technologies

David has held leadership roles at 3COM, Cisco Systems, Nortel Networks, and IBM where he promoted advanced network technologies including High Speed Ethernet, Layer 4-7 switching, Virtual Machine-aware networking, and Software Defined Networking.

David’s current focus is on the evolving landscape of data center networking, scale out storage, Open Networking, and cloud computing.

Lance Wilson

Senior HPC Consultant, Monash University

Lance Wilson is a mechanical engineer, who has been making tools to break things for the last 20 years. His career has moved through a number of engineering subdisciplines from manufacturing to bioengineering. Now he supports the national characterisation research community in Melbourne, Australia using OpenStack to create HPC systems solving problems too large for your laptop.

Robert Starmer

CTO & Founding Partner, Kumulus Technologies

With 20+ years in the automation space I find all things cloud interesting. By focusing on the latest models for operations and application automation, I help enable value from OpenStack, Containers, CAPS tools, and Dev/Ops CI/CD pipelines. I am the CTO and Founder at Kumulus Technologies, a San Francisco Bay area infrastructure focused Dev/Ops consultancy. I am also a Certified OpenStack Administrator.

David Perry

Compute Integration Specialist, The University of Melbourne

Dr. David Perry is Compute Integration Specialist at The University of Melbourne, working to increase research productivity using cloud and HPC. David chairs Australia's first community-owned wind farm, Hepburn Wind, and is co-founder/CTO of BoomPower, delivering simpler solar and battery purchasing decisions for consumers and NGOs.

Tim Serong

Senior Clustering Engineer, SUSE

Alexander Tsirel

Senior Software Developer/Devops, HiveTec

Moved from Estonia to join a huge project about building software deeply integrated with government Employment Services. Specialising in infrastructure architecting, cloud automation, continuous integration.
Working on infrastructure scaling for resource-hungry applications grid bundling docker, windows server, swift in one mission critical system.

Blair Bethwaite

Senior HPC Consultant, Monash University

Blair has worked in distributed computing at Monash University for 10 years, with OpenStack for half of that. Having served as team lead, architect, administrator, user, researcher, and occasional hacker, Blair's unique perspective as a science power-user, developer, and system architect has helped guide the evolution of the research computing engine central to Monash's 21st Century Microscope.

Alex Tesch

APJ Cloud Consultant, Hewlett Packard Enterprise

Alex has been working with Open Source enterprise technologies for the better part of his 15 years IT career in companies like Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, Red Hat, IBM and Sun Microsystems.

He started his OpenStack journey with Grizzly, delivering the first HPC cloud in APAC for a Singapore University making use of SRIOV technologies combined with big data. He has extensive deployment experience on configuration management and automation of private cloud based on OpenStack.

Alex is currently an APJ Cloud Consultant in the Helion Cloud team at Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, where he evangelizes the OpenSource side of the Helion portfolio (OpenStack / Docker / Ceph).

He enjoys running automation workshops and seminars in the APJ region for cloud adopters.

Scott Laffer

Member of Technical Staff, Cumulus Networks

Scott is a Member of Technical Staff at Cumulus Networks where he designs, supports and deploys web-scale technologies and architectures in enterprise networks globally. Prior to becoming a founding member of the Cumulus office in Australia, Scott started his career as a network administrator before joining Cisco Systems to support their data centre products.

Paul David Coddington

Deputy Director, NeCTAR

Dr Paul Coddington is a Deputy Director of NeCTAR, responsible for the Nectar national Research Cloud, and also Deputy Director of eResearch SA. He has over 30 years experience in eResearch including computational science, high performance and distributed computing, cloud computing, software development, and research data management.

Tarso dos Santos

Technical Account Manager, Veritas

Tarso dos Santos works as a Technical Account Manager at Veritas, directly engaging with customers to develop strategies, architectures and solutions with focus on Cloud - Openstack, Containers, Data Protection, High Availability and Compliance.
He has over 21 years in the IT industry architecting, delivering and positioning solutions such as private clouds, distributed systems, hpc, storage, and high available platforms.
Tarso has a great interest in distributed systems performance, and scientific organizations that push the boundaries of existing technologies, but also need to link these into the Enterprise.
Tarso in his life has enjoyed working in some of the most amazing projects ranging from mission critical systems protecting Australian lives, to IT infrastructure projects that are looking at the sky and discovering new planets out in the space.

Dr Shunde Zhang

Senior Software Developer, Aptira

Shunde is a senior software developer in Aptira with over 15 years experience in software development, automation and system administration. He has worked with OpenStack since the Diablo cycle and has been involved in projects from OpenStack infrastructure to distributed systems running on top of OpenStack.

Lev Lafayette

HPC and Training Officer, University of Melbourne

Lev Lafayette is the HPC and Training Officer at the University of Melbourne. Prior to that he worked at the Victorian Partnership for Advanced Computing for several years in a similar role.

Adrian Koh

Global Business Development, EasyStack

Adrian is Director Global Business Development in EasyStack and has 20 years working experience in leading tech companies in the IT industry.

Prior to joining EasyStack, Adrian was with IBM Singapore and IBM China and served in roles such as Offering Manager, Engagement Manager, Solution Architect, Services Consultant, IT Specialist.

Adrian holds a Bachelor of Science degree with honors in Computer Sciences from University of Texas at Austin.

Nigel Wright

Cloud Technologist/Architect, Dimension Data

Nigel Wright is based in Auckland, New Zealand and works as a Cloud Technologist/Architect, with a focus on Digital Transformation and Cloud. Nigel has over 15 years in the IT industry and is a passionate Hybrid Cloud and PaaS Evangelist, focused on innovation using software development tools, automation and cloud technologies. Most recently he has been involved in projects to help companies transition to operating in a cloud native world.

Nigel has a strong interest in data analytics, automation/orchestration, container technology and DevOps culture. He is also a contributor to the Cloud Slang opensource orchestration product (http://cloudslang.io)

Andy Botting

DevOps Engineer, University of Melbourne

Andy is a DevOps engineer working at the University of Melbourne in the Core Services team for the Nectar Research Cloud.

Peter Rowe

Senior Solution Engineer, Flexera Software

Involved in and around IT development for over 20 years, starting as a web developer using NotePad in 1995 when the most exciting thing online was Sun's animated Java coffee cup, through Numega Pre-Sales selling BoundsChecker and now into the brave, new World of Open Source and software composition analysis.

Andrew Ruthven

Data Center Manager, Catalyst IT

Andrew has been involved in the open source community for a long time, both professionally and privately. Professionally Andrew is currently the Data Centre Manager for Catalyst IT, and is heavily involved in Catalyst's NZ based cloud offering - the Catalyst Cloud.

Andrew has been the driving force behind Catalyst IT deploying Open Compute Project equipment for growing their cloud regions.

Roland Chan

COO & Inventor of Solutionauting, Aptira

Roland has been in the Internet industry for almost twenty years, running business critical technology delivery organisations to build some of Australia’s largest telco, ISP and digital media solutions at OzEmail, WorldCom and Telstra.
Roland’s focus on engaging with customers and understanding their needs combined with a cutting edge technology delivery method makes Aptira a flexible delivery partner for any organisation.
In 2015, Roland assumed Aptira’s seat on the OpenStack Foundation Board of Directors.

Sara Ogston

VicNode Manager, University of Melbourne

Experienced Manager with a demonstrated history of working in the higher education industry. Strong professional skilled in Project Management, Operations, Analytical Skills, and Risk Management. Passionate about increasing diversity in the IT industry. Board member of Vic ICT for Women a, non profit organization which increases the entry, retention and progression of women in IT. Steering Committee member of Go Girl, Go for IT and lead of Grad Girls program offering of Vic ICT for Women

Dr Steve Quenette

Deputy Director, Monash University eResearch Centre

Dr Steve Quenette has been Deputy Director of Monash University’s eResearch Centre since 2010. The centre’s mandate is to greatly accelerate use and access to world-class computational, data-oriented and multi-modal research infrastructure and scientific methodologies. The centre services almost 5000 researchers across Monash University, the Monash precincts and Australia. He is responsible for driving high-performance computing on the cloud, data-analysis driven computing infrastructure and safe environments for medical research, all leading to world-first announcements. Steve is an applied mathematician and computer scientist, with a primary research area of programming language theory, and application to parallel programming, computational problems in the sciences, and inversion. He has long applied this expertise to geodynamics and geophysical problems, previously holding a position at Caltech and being co-author to software underpinning numerous a Nature papers.

Sarah Nisbet

Marketing and Communications Manager, eRSA

Sarah Nisbet is eRSA’s Marketing and Communications Manager. Sarah began her career delivering communications solutions in the health care sector where she mastered the art of working across institutions, departments and organisational silos.

Sarah has a Bachelor of Media from the University of Adelaide and an Industry Certificate (Festival & Event Design & Management), she is also a member of the Australian Science Communicators and the Public Relations Institute of Australia.

She specialises in delivering creative and innovative marketing and communication solutions and has managed local and national projects for eRSA, NeCTAR, NeAT, AeRO and the State Government of South Australia. Having successfully deployed a new tier 0 user documentation system at eRSA, Sarah was the project lead for the tier 0 development for core NeCTAR services, supporting a national initiative to provide world class user support for the Nectar Cloud.

Sarah is currently the Project Manager of the Australian National Cultures and Community Project, which is looking to enable better data sharing and discoverability between researchers and archives. Alongside stakeholders, such as National Library of Australia, National Australian Archives, Tasmanian Archives and Heritage Office (TAHO) and Queensland State Archives, we’re developing an Open API to test the concept that if a research adds value (transcription, metadata, annotation) to a dataset from a cultural institution, how can that be shared back to the source institution (API, catalogue record, linked records, machine to machine capabilities)? This pilot project aims to operationalise a national, sustainable and scalable API standard that will allow data (and metadata) sharing and transfer between the Prosecution Project, TAHO and QSA.

Sonia Ramza

Community Management, OpenStack

Sonia joined the OpenStack Foundation in 2017 in the community management division, taking on tasks such as the user group process and managing the Ambassador program. She is also working to increase student engagement through new initiatives like ``OpenStack comes to Campus``.